Page 131 of A Wolf After My Own Heart
“Yes. Poor cub, she’s got a tough road ahead. I know you—all of you—faced danger for me and mine. I’m more grateful than I can say.” Then to Lila: “I’m sorry you got hauled into this, miss.”
“I’m not sorry I got hauled into it.”
“You’re very kind, miss.”
“Lila.”
“Miss Lila.”
“Ugh.”
Garsea let out a small sound very like a snort, and Lila raised an eyebrow at her. Oz had crossed the room and was looking out the south-facing window. “Don’t worry,” Sam said. “Wendy made sure to put me in a room where, if I hobbled to the window, I wouldn’t see my wife’s tomb.”
“You were right here the entire time,” Berne marveled. “I should have checked the house. Stupid. Stupid.”
“Give yourself a break, Maggie. No one could have predicted any of the last month’s insanity. But you helped my daughter when she was at her most vulnerable. It’s all I could have asked of you.”
Berne shook his head. “Nae, Sam. Don’t misunderstand, I’m liking that ye finally appreciate my stellar qualities—”
“Ha!”
“—but I didn’t do much of anything. Oz and Annette deserve most of the credit. And Lila here did far more to keep Sally safe than I did.”
“I gave her honey and pizza.”
Sam chuckled. “Her favorites.”
“So what happened?” Berne asked. “I heard Oz’s theory. Now I’d like to hear the rest.”
“Someone fucked with your plane, Maggie. And then they fucked with us. Sue put it together, but not fast enough to save herself. Can you believe how long those SAS pricks held a grudge?”
“Well,now,” Berne admitted, and Sam laughed. It was weak and thready, but it was something. “Sally knows her mother was sick. But the wee lass didn’t have any details, o’course. If you could… would you mind…?”
“Yes. Leukemia. Sue’s white cells went into overdrive. We tried to keep it from Sally as long as we could, but Sue was already looking at hospice care options. The cancer… It was like a grass fire in a drought month.” To Lila: “Our kind can fight off a lot of pathogens, but cancer isn’t one of them. It kills us like it does anything else.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you, Lila. My wife knew she was destined to die in a hospital room with the smell of her own shit in her nose. She wanted to stick it out for Sally’s sake, while at the same time she was torn about letting Sally watch her deteriorate. In a completely stupid and unexpected way, SAS gave her a third option and she didn’t hesitate.” Sam lapsed into silence and just lay there, struggling for the right words to describe the thing that tried to devour his wife and the people who tried to devour his daughter.
“She made you jump,” Lila guessed. “It’s why they only found one parachute. It’s unbelievable to me that you survived. The fall should have killed you.”
“It should have killed a Stable,” he corrected gently. “Still, I’m not exactly unscathed, as you can see.” This with a wry smile as he indicated the casts. “I gave Wendy and Kelly the fright of their lives, staggering up their driveway like I did. Tough work on a broken tibia, I can tell you.”
“Kelly?”
“Wendy’s wife. The gods smiled on me by making her a nurse. She’s on-shift at the local hospital right now.”
“So you found help, somehow talked them out of calling for an ambulance—”
“I bribed them. I agreed to buy their field. Wendy’s been wanting to sell it for a decade.”
“Okay, so Kelly the nurse filched supplies from the hospital to patch you up. And they helped you hide? You couldn’t let anyone know you were alive until you knew who sabotaged Berne’s plane,” Lila said, thinking out loud. “You couldn’t risk someone showing up here and finishing the job.”
“And there was Kelly and Wendy to think of as well,” Sam added.
Oz picked up the narrative. “You’d heard disquieting rumors to do with IPA—”
Sam nodded. “Yes, the trafficking thing. Sue thought there was more going on than anyone knew, but not exactly what.”
